SoftLayer Asia - A Technology Market Full of Opportunity

The last few months have been extremely busy for SoftLayer Asia. SLayers from our Singapore office have been participating in all kinds of events — from small developer group meetups to massive conferences like CommunicAsia 2012 that brought in 35,000+ attendees from the APAC region's major markets, and our goal has been the same throughout: SoftLayer has the platform on which our customers can build the future.

Web Hosting Days 2012 - Bangkok, Thailand

While our goal to help our customers "build the future" might seem like a tall order, the market in Asia needs the capabilities that only SoftLayer is able to provide. With the recent boom in smartphones and the growth of the region's huge network of connectivity infrastructure, Asian companies with global customer bases are facing an exciting market with a great deal of promise. In 2012 alone, analyst group Canalys forecasts:

An estimated 253.57 million smartphones in APAC in 2012 alone (compared to 224.08 million in North America).

APAC smartphone penetration is expected to exceed that of North America by 13%.

While that technology market is attractive, many business owners find that it can be equally intimidating. That sentiment is one the biggest reasons our customers share when we ask why they chose to to trust SoftLayer's SNG01 data center with their data. They need a platform that provides stability and on-demand scalability at an affordable price point, and they've seen SoftLayer deliver on all of those needs.

SoftLayer CMO Simon West presenting at Cloud Asia 2012

You might think that having a foundation of the best technology platform in a technology-focused market guarantees success when it comes to launching social and Internet-based businesses, but that's only part of the story. The most important aspect of our customers' successes have been the creative, innovative solutions that they've been able to build because they're not worried about whether their infrastructure can keep up with their ideas. In Asia's crowded technology-centric market, a company's primary concern should be continuously meeting the needs of its rapidly evolving and growing customer base, and that's what we want to empower. Here are a few examples of SoftLayer customers we've seen that embody that mentality:

Tandif is an Indonesian based company that provides accurate and efficient auto-moderation of any web property connected to the Internet. Tandif's service is available in English and Bahasa Indonesia, one of the most vibrant internet and social media growth markets on a regional and global scale.

Wildby is a start up from the Joyful Frog Digital Incubator (regional affiliate of the Techstars program) that launched an application to addresses a region's unique technology need. Many parents are "guilty" of handing over their tablets or smartphones to entertain their kids in the car as they sit out the many crazy traffic jams in our major cities. Wildby's "edu-tainment" app allows children aged 3 to 7 yrs visually interact and learn new words and concepts anywhere they have access to the app.

Qyro — another JFDI graduate — was founded by an international team of entrepreneurs to build a patent-pending enterprise-based solution called Stubb, which provides users full-featured virtual document sharing and controls over both hard and soft copies.

Each of these companies has been very successful in their respective markets, and they're looking to SoftLayer to help them expand their business footprint in Asia to reach customers in North America and Europe. They absolutely love what our private network means for those goals: Geographic boundaries are blurred. Why is that important? Just how global is the Asian market?

Southeast Asia alone takes center stage when it comes to global adoption of the world's most popular Internet properties:

Indonesia, India and Philippines are part of the top 10 markets for Facebook users' growth, with Indonesia ranking #2 worldwide.

21% of Indonesian online users visited Twitter.com in January 2011, making it the fourth highest country in terms of Twitter reach.

Malaysia is the #1 country in Southeast Asia when it comes to Foursquare user base (the USA is 167 positions lower)!

Needless to say, given the opportunity here and the passionate entrepreneurs trying to take advantage of it, SoftLayer Asia is going to be extremely busy for a long time.